Shiite Arab militias have flooded into northern Iraq's Kirkuk region to help Kurdish forces battle the Islamic State group, but their uneasy alliance threatens to reignite a much older conflict over the oil-rich area pitting the largely autonomous Kurds against the Arab-led government in Baghdad.

President Barack Obama's view of the U.S. role in the Middle East and North Africa is being challenged by deepening crises in the very countries he has seen as models for his approach to the volatile region: Iraq, Syria, Yemen and Libya.
After making...

WASHINGTON While the world worries about the growing power of Islamic State militants, some Iraqi lawmakers and residents allege Shiite militias linked to the Baghdad government are attacking Sunni civilians, driving thousands from their homes and raising...

Iraq's former Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki on Monday denied he is seeking a political comeback, despite frequent appearances in local media and a recent visit to the country's influential neighbor Iran.
Al-Maliki, who stepped aside last year after...

Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah, the powerful U.S. ally who fought against al-Qaida and sought to modernize the ultraconservative Muslim kingdom, including by nudging open greater opportunities for women, has died. He was 90.
More than his guarded and...

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Shi'ite militias and Iraqi security forces, engaged in an all-or-nothing struggle with radical Sunni group Islamic State, are blasting the Sunni farmlands that encircle Baghdad with heavy weapons. Military officers call their target areas in the rural belt "killing zones."
"In these parts, there are no civilians," said Lieutenant Colonel Haider Mohammed Hatem, deputy commander of the armed forces around Abu Ghraib, just west of the capital. "Everyone in these killing zones we consider Islamic State."...

Imagine President Franklin Roosevelt announcing at the end of 1944, after the liberation of France but before the final defeat of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, that World War II was over and that U.S. forces were ending combat operations. Instead we would support our allies, from Britain to China, in their fight against the Axis powers.
Hard to imagine, but that's roughly what happened Sunday when the International Security Assistance Command held a ceremony in Kabul to mark the “end” of...

After 13 years of war, more than 2,300 dead U.S. troops and the replacement of the Taliban regime with an elected government, the United States this past weekend declared a formal end to its combat mission in Afghanistan. That's an important symbolic marker, but no one should interpret the declaration as the end of anything. Some 10,800 U.S. troops remain behind to train and support the still-young Afghan military. Surviving Taliban forces — which operate with relative impunity from the lawless...

At the dawn of 2015, the U.S. has yet to articulate a comprehensive foreign-policy strategy to counter the influence and territorial gains of Islamic State, the terrorist group that emerged last year — and poses a dangerous and vexing threat to stability across the Middle East and North Africa. By the Pentagon's admission, we neither understand the underlying ideology of the merciless group nor have a grasp of all the players in the region who have aggravated the crisis.
Indeed, the fog of war...

The United States has the most potent military in terms of firepower and operational capacity in history. Our military overthrew Saddam Hussein and crushed the Taliban in a matter of weeks. Our forces can direct a rocket from Nevada through a window in Kandahar, Afghanistan, and nimbly set up nearly 20 Ebola treatment centers in Liberia.
Yet this same military, as writer James Fallows recently pointed out in the Atlantic, has not won its wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya or anywhere else in the last 20...

WASHINGTON -- Two disparate news items caught my eye recently that demonstrate how our government can act in ways that mystify and anger the taxpayers who support it with their hard-earned money.
The first was the report from the new prime minister of Iraq, Haider al-Abadi, that about 50,000 Iraqi men were on his broken military's payroll who weren't even in the army, but were drawing as much as $600 a month in salary.
These so-called "ghost soldiers" were among the padded military of departed Prime...